Salsify, a Boston-based product content management platform for retail brands, announced on Wednesday that it has raised a $30 million Series C round led by local venture capital firm Underscore.VC.
The new round, which brings total funding to $54.6 million, comes after company revenue grew more than 330 percent year-over-year in 2016 and its team reached 120 employees. Existing investors Venrock, Matrix Partners and North Bridge also participated.
While Salsify CEO Jason Purcell declined to state the company's valuation with this round, he said "it was meaningfully higher than the previous round."
Purcell told me the company plans to use the funds to hire 80 new positions this year, scale its go-to market strategy and advance product development. The company's product content management software helps retail brands like Coca-Cola and Fruit of the Loom deliver and manage product content in collaboration with retailers, ranging from ecommerce sites like Wayfair and Jet.com to retail giant Walmart, with the goal of helping those brands improve sales.
"We’ve only started to scratch the surface of this," Purcell said. While declining the name the number of customers Salsify has, he said there are thousands of brands using its software. Customers pay an annual fee to use Salsify, ranging anywhere from $10,000 to amounts in the six figures, Purcell said, based on how many products, users and modules they have on the platform.
On the product development front, Purcell said that will involve creating more feature using data science that helps merchandisers make better decisions as to how they sell the product, online and offline. For example, he said, Salsify could help brands figure out how they should display their products in different stores, such as displaying certain images or reworking bullet features.
"The way I describe product is not how I would describe it in a year," Purcell said, offering another example of how data analytics can help brands to make decisions about how they display and sell products.
With ecommerce sales outpacing brick-and-mortar sales in the most recent holiday shopping season, Purcell said Salsify is in the right place to help both brands and retailers embrace the digital transformation.
"If I'm not the one directly selling my product, I've had blinders on for years," Purcell said, describing how brands previously had to operate without solutions like Salsify. "This is an opportunity to take the friction out of the digital supply chain."
